Worldship Files: Firewyrm

By Erik Schubach

When the Earth is threatened by a slowly expanding sun, mankind embarks upon a mission to send a mammoth Worldship to settle a new planet across the stars. The preternatural races step out of hiding to work with the humans to save what they can from their dying world. With the aid of the Fae, shape shifters, Vampires, and other creatures of supernatural lore, the Worldship, Leviathan, is complete one thousand years later.

Fire is the most terrifying concept on an interstellar spaceship like the Leviathan. Enforcer Knith Shade is tasked to investigate one that threatened the Alpha-Stack of the Worldship and uncover who was responsible for it when Queen Mab is the primary suspect.

But Queen Mab has more tricks up her sleeve, and the investigation brings Knith back into contact with her ex, much to the chagrin of Princess Aurora who may or may not be in a relationship with Knith.

Things are never as they seem as Enforcer Shade soon discovers, when she finds that the myths and legends of beings called Firewyrms may not be so mythological after all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Schubach
• Release date: Dec 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463028186

Erik Schubach

I got my start writing romance novels by accident. I have always been drawn to strong female characters in books, like Honor Harrington. And I also believe that there is a lack of LGBT characters in media. So one day I came up with a story idea that combines the two... two days later I completed the manuscript for Music of the Soul.My writing style may not be the most professional nor grammatically correct, but I never profess to be an English major, just a person that wants to share a story. I maintain that my primary language is sarcasm.Each of my books features strong likeable female characters that are flawed. I think that flaws and emotional or physical scars make us human and give us more character than simply conforming to some "social norm".I have also started a SciFi series, The Valkyrie Chronicles which features a Valkyrie, Kara, who was left behind on Earth five thousand years ago to help the Asgard race escape the onslaught of the Ragnarok horde. With the aid of a human, Kate, she holds the line in battle to herald the return of the Asgard!If you like magic, paranormal romance and witches, then my new series Fracture might tickle your fancy. In the first book Fracture: Divergence, Alex King must stop magic from destroying reality. The problem is that Alex must solve the case in parallel universes where in one Alex is male and female in the other.There is even a modern shapeshifter paranormal series, Drakon. Featuring a fiery Irish woman with a sharp wit and sharper temper who finds out she is a dragon of legend.

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Worldship Files: Firewyrm

By Erik Schubach

Copyright © 2019 by Erik Schubach

Published by Erik Schubach on Smashwords

P.O. Box 523

Nine Mile Falls, WA 99026

Cover Photo © 2019 Digitalstorm / Intueri / Dreamstime.com licenses

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, blog, or broadcast.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Manufactured in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

For Nikki, you will be missed.

Chapter 1 – We Didn't Start The Fire

One of the drawbacks of being an officer of the Enforcer's Brigade on the Worldship Leviathan is that it seems you are always on call. You patrol the quad of your home ring and police the citizens who run afoul of the law and investigate any cases in your area.

On the positive side, you have full autonomy, and though most enforcers work with partners, other enforcers aren't brought in on your cases unless you called them in for backup. You handle all aspects of your cases up until your suspects go before a judge. Once you made that hand-off, you are free to go back to your normal duties.

But there are a handful of times where, no matter what you were doing, whether you were in the middle of an investigation or just trying to enjoy your off-hours, that you dropped everything to run to the aid of the citizens of the Leviathan.

Two scenarios come quickly to mind. First was a hull breach in the Worldship, whether in one of the habitation rings, the trunk, or the Heart of the multigenerational vessel we call our world. The other was, in my opinion, even more terrifying. Fire.

In a hull breach, the danger of being sucked out into hard vacuum was frightening, but the series of blast doors in every section of the ship limited that possibility by sealing off any sections that were exposed to vacuum. And in the case of complete power failure in those sections, the blast doors failed closed, which means if power was cut, the artificial gravity, created by the centrifugal force of the spinning rings, pulled the doors down to seal.

Infinitely worse was a fire in the enclosed environment of a ship in space. It could spread out of control, consuming vital oxygen that is needed to keep us all alive. And if the fire spread from the skin and bulkhead corridors and out into the open spaces in a ring, consuming green spaces that helped to generate oxygen to replace what is lost is such a catastrophe, thousands of lives could be at risk.

The last time this occurred was in the C-Ring of Delta-Stack three hundred years ago, when the parkland area called The Strip had caught fire, burning all two hundred square acres before emergency containment crews got it under control. The entire ring needed emergency evac and three dozen souls were lost. It took three months for the air scrubbers to make the atmosphere breathable again, and almost three decades to repair all of the structural damage.

I swear that C-Ring Delta still smells of hints of smoke whenever I have to visit it. The entire Delta-Stack was reduced to eighty-five percent of normal atmospheric oxygen saturation for nine months before the organics generated enough oxygen to replace what was lost and replenish their reserves.

I shuddered at the thought as I put my cards on the table and stood, looking around at the others as the alarm klaxons sounded. Mac's lips were a tight line on his face, worry in his eyes. He was the supposedly human captain of the Remnant vessel Underhill, and I suspected he was a whole lot more as well. Mir, the human woman who went full cyber with total body replacement with her mirrored skin, stood with Jane, the cute Faun madame of the Underhill's brothel.

The last occupant of the captain's cabin where we were having our weekly game of Quads down-ring on the Underhill, where it and the other Remnant ships docked to her where she occupied one of the airlock docking ports on the skin of the Beta-Stack's D-Ring, was Ben. Another human Enforcer like me. He moonlighted at the brothel here to supplement the meager income we made as Enforcers.

I snapped up my goggles from the side table as Jane and Mir left swiftly to see to the people in the brothel. The corridor outside the cabin looked to be chaos with people running and yelling as they either ran back to the world through the airlock or to their quarters here on the ancient construction and engineering vessel which had helped to build the Leviathan over five thousand years ago. That the Underhill or any other Remnants were still space worthy was a miracle in itself.

My goggles, well they technically belonged to my ex, Myra, had a full tech pack like my armor which I was sorely missing just then. Myra flew with the Ready Squadron, the ace fliers who were always on point, flying in front of the Leviathan, and clearing a path through any asteroid, meteor or comet debris which crossed our path. Blowing anything larger than a Hel Ball into smaller pieces that couldn't penetrate the armor of the Skin. So the goggles, even though they were twenty-six years old, almost matched the tech of my new experimental armor.

With a thought, the virtual screens bloomed in my vision as I asked quickly, Mother?

The AI of the Leviathan answered me in the stilted, mechanical tone she used when people other than me could hear her. Fire in Alpha-Stack B-Ring, Priority Orange. All emergency crews from all stacks ordered to respond.

Priority Orange? I felt the blood drain from my face. By the gods...

The A and B rings of each stack held vast forests like were rumored to have existed on the Ground, under Open Air, where machines and the ship's oxygen processing systems were not needed to keep us breathing, to keep us alive. But I have questioned if they were simply rumors after speaking to a couple of the Old Earth Fae who say they were there on the day five thousand years ago when the Leviathan left the orbit of that dying planet.

And Fae... well everyone knows that the Greater Fae cannot lie. Which makes them the best deceivers of all the races, they can spin the truth to make you believe anything they wish and not tell a single lie while doing it. And being in the Brigade, I've seen the outer rings, the lush forests and villages, and rivers that they modeled after Earth. I can almost imagine what it would be like if those forests went on forever instead of being constrained to just a mile wide strip in the fifty-mile diameter torus of the A-Rings. And B-Rings, while still mind-boggling huge, weren't quite as heavily forested, but they were still over two-thirds covered in green spaces and crops.

Code-Orange was just about the worst-case scenario, it meant that, like the incident in the Delta-Stack's C-Ring, the fire had breached the bulkhead and was threatening the green spaces. If the forests caught... well, this could kill the entire Alpha-Stack.

I started toward the door. Emergency travel time? I already knew, and it made me feel useless. I'd have to travel to a spoke, then down to the trunk and over to the Alpha-Stack and then up-ring to B.

Using emergency transit lanes, forty-one minutes, fifteen seconds, Mother replied

I reached the door and paused and asked, Jump Pods? In a fire, forty-one minutes was forty lifetimes.

The tin voice responded, Including transit time to the nearest Jump Terminal, and four jumps. Twenty-seven minutes, two seconds.

Fuck.

Mac cleared his throat behind me and I looked back, and the man tapped the air in front of his eyes. I reached up absently to touch the goggles I wore and got his meaning. Again, my blood ran cold but just nodded thanks to him.

He followed on my heels as I dashed out into the corridor. Aft docking port is two levels down.

We pushed through the diminishing foot traffic toward the lift bank and ladders down instead of turning toward the airlock to the world. We had to move aside as a centaur trotted past in a panic. Mac shared as we slid down the first ladder, "I'd fly you there myself, but the other remnants who are docked with me would have to detach and move to a safe distance, you don't have that kind of time.

I had no doubt that he would. I started to ask Mother as I cringed, Connect me with... She was, as always, two steps ahead of me. To someone else, it would likely be unnerving if Mother anticipated their needs before you even voiced them, but she has always had my back.

A familiar voice from my past, frosty and devoid of emotion, spoke before I finished my request, Knith? Knith Shade? I'm a little busy right now, lady. Most of the Ready Fleet is being recalled for an emergency in...

I cut her off. Fire in Alpha-B. Need transport from the Underhill on the Skin of Beta-D.

She lost the cold in her tone and was serious as a heart attack at the mention of the fire. Underhill? Mother, coord... ah, thank you. That old Remnant wreck? What are you... never mind, ETA two minutes.

Mac pointed to the end of a corridor with a metal grid floor, seeing the wide red and white warning stripes around the airlock door, and the blue light indicating hard vacuum on the other side of the double set of doors.

I nodded my thanks, and he handed me my bombardier jacket which, technically was Myra's too. Wait a minute, Mir had just been wearing this so we didn't see her cards reflected on her chest when she left the card game to go to the brothel.

So how did he... magic?

He didn't even have the common decency to wait for me to accuse him of being King Oberon before he spun on his heel and headed back down the corridor. Godspeed, Knith, things are about to get... interesting. Where there's flame, there isn't necessarily fire.

Ok, why did that just scare me as much as the alarm klaxons? Did I want things to get interesting? Mother, back to her normal chirpy and emotive state said to me, Why does that man give me the chills?

Can an AI get chills?

Focus, Knith.

Right. Ok, ETA?

Fifteen seconds.

I nodded. Great, and I'll need my...

She sighed at me and said in a patient tone, I've already had your armor sent in the tubes. It'll be there when you are.

I loved how she anticipated my needs.

The transit tubes were a high-speed delivery system that could get packages delivered even from the greatest distance, Alpha-Stack A-Ring to Delta-Stack A-Ring in just a couple of minutes. And emergency services had their own set of tubes that paralleled the system.

I saw something swoop down through the windows of the airlock and smoothly contact the docking port with barely a sound translating through the ship's hull. I smiled weakly to myself. Myra was one of the best pilots in Ready Squadron, an amazing feat as she, like me, was only human. Most of the other preternatural species that inhabited the Worldship had better reflexes and situational awareness than us.

The lights cycled on the controls until they showed three greens of a hard seal and pressurization. I cycled the inner doors and stepped inside, and once the doors cycled shut, the outer airlock doors cycled and a familiar figure stood in the opening, her tail twitched with annoyance.

I felt almost embarrassed, not knowing what to say to her as her slitted feline eyes blinked. Umm... hi Myra. Thank you for coming and...

She actually hissed at me. She had always had a cyber cat fetish and was heavily modded. The only human I knew personally who had gone farther with mods than Myra was Mir. Just get your ass into my ship and strap in. The reports on the waves sound bad.

I nodded and hustled after her into the small, sleek, two-seat Sentinel, and strapped into the co-pilot station. She slid into the pilot's seat with the liquid grace that had attracted me to her in the first place and took her in as she disengaged the docking clamps and prepped for flight like she had done it a million times.

The soft downy fur of her feline face begged to be touched, with its calico markings. I could see where time had matured her from the young and foolish twenty-one-year-olds we had been, to a young adult of forty-six. The maturity looked good on her.

She glanced at me and did a double-take, seeing me looking her over. She slid her flight goggles on as she prompted, Is that my old gear?

Oh, mother fairy humper... this was embarrassing. When I was off duty and heading down-ring to the Underhill, I wore her stuff for an Irontown Grunge look so I fit in on the Remnants, since I didn't own very many civilian clothes. Until recently, the Brigade has sort of been my entire life.

I sputtered, I, umm...

Don't sweat it, it looks good on you. Then she squinted at me as the ship arced smoothly away from the Underhill, leaving my stomach behind. You look exactly the same, not a day older.

I shrugged. I had always looked young for my age, which I have always seen as a curse, as it makes it difficult to get the respect of the other Enforcers in the Brigade, add to that that I'm human, and I usually get the shit postings.

It wasn't until recently that I learned that it wasn't by accident. I was a failed experiment by the Fae, to create a Changeling, a bridge between humans and Greater Fae so that they could bring their population back up to the numbers they had after Exodus from the dying Earth. Without that bond to the magic of Old Earth, the Fae discovered they couldn't reproduce. They hope that when we arrive at our new home on Eridani Prime at the end of the Leviathan's ten thousand year journey, that the native nature magic of that planet will be enough to give them the ability again.

The Fae Princess of the Unseelie Winter Court, Aurora Ashryver, who I might possibly be in some sort of relationship with... it's still a little vague to me, had attempted to create a bridge, so that their people could reproduce by making beings that were half-human, and half-Fae, and their offspring would be fully Fae. The experiment failed. The only embryo that survived at the Beta-Stack Reproduction Clinic was, well... me.

Where she had failed to create a Changeling, she did succeed in making me sort of, more human? I was what she excitedly calls the next evolution of man. My genes are all tailored to be the best and improved versions of human, and all the shortcomings we humans have as the lesser race on the world were edited out of me. Including apparently, my lifespan.

When cells divide, the telomeres in the chromosomes shorten. This is the aging process. And when those telomeres are too short to divide, then the organism... Humans, in this case, die. Like a kill switch in computer code, Humans are programmed to die after only a hundred and fifty to two hundred years. My chromosomes have no degradation of telomeres by design.

For all intents and purposes, as long as I don't die, I had a sort of limited immortality. I healed faster than an average human, but I could still die from wounds just like any other human. It had the unfortunate side effect of leaving me looking around nineteen or twenty for the rest of my life, like the Fae. Even the oldest and most